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Monday, November 4, 2013

Combat Group Construction v2.0

I've gotten some feedback in the past that conversion to the FLASH! smaller style combat groups was a bit difficult to figure out. Over the weekend, I played a game of blitz and was chatting afterwards with my opponent and had some ideas about how to make the construction simpler as well as reducing the overabundance of "veteran" units in blitz (every one of both our models were vets with Att/Def3 making the upgrade somewhat useless as it was the new standard).

For army construction, I've decided to try out the following.

For vehicle and gear combat groups in Blitz, construct your Blitz combat group as normal initially and then use the following conversion to fireteams.1-2 model CG in Blitz: 1 model (CGL) combat groupin FLASH!

You may choose any models you have in your full blitz squad keeping in mind that models using veteran upgrades must spend a veteran slot to do so per the rules below. Combat groups containing combined models (like infantry) are unchanged from Blitz. Before taking another Fire Team of the same type, you must take a second combat sub-group with your remaining models (if any) from the first Blitz combat group. For example, selecting a Blitz two tank squadron gives you a single model in FLASH! (the CGL). If in Blitz you upgraded the tank squadron to 3 models by adding an extra tank, the FLASH! version would be 2 models instead (CGL and one of your choice). If you wanted to add a second tank squadron of the same type, you'd have to first take a second combat group consisting of the remaining tank you didn't take above in both examples.My original intent was to make the fire teams half size mirrors of the full blitz versions but that seems to have lead to some confusion unfortunately. I've rarely seen bog standard models in games unless those bog standard models were quite special to begin with (like my opponent's Fer de Lances this past game) so why fight the inevitable. The above instead lets you just cherry pick whatever you want from blitz instead of being a half size version with the caveat that you must "complete" the original blitz squad

As for veteran slots, I've decided to try changing the veteran slot effect to applying only to a single model instead of the whole squad. With the ability to cherry pick the models, this seems like killing two birds with one stone. It limits the overpowered possiblities inherent to cherry picking upgraded models somewhat and also grounds the game a bit more at att/def2 without everyone fielding extra sturdy boxes.

Veteran Slots: You get a number of veteran slots equal to your army PL in Flash!. Each slot may be used to upgrade a single model to veteran status and unlock veteran options for it. (i.e. a single gear or a single squad of infantry is upgraded for each vet slot spent).
You may buy extra veteran slots at the cost of 2 SP per veteran slot.

You can still take a fair number of veteran upgrades (PL4 gives you 7 in a 1000TV game which is the upper limit roughly for my skirmish houserules) but you're giving up all your SP to get to that point. Honestly, I think att/def3 and extra sturdy boxes should be more expensive but changing TV is going beyond what I'd like to do with my blog and would prefer to leave that to DP9 themselves.

As usual, let me know if you try any of the above or whether you think it's an improvement. I'm leaving the original army construction rules in the table of contents to the right for the time being to aid in comparison but hope to eventually change the chapter once I get some feedback.